Explaining avoidance: two factors are still better than one.

Two-factor theory remains a viable account of avoidance behavior. By emphasizing the interplay of respondent and operant contingencies, two-factor theory encourages the analysis of stimuli that mediate molar consequences and incorporates control by local events as well as events that are temporally remote, improbable, or cumulative.     

Revisiting the dimensional structure of the emotion domain

Recent research has claimed that a novelty dimension is needed to represent the cognitive emotion structure over and above valence, power and arousal. Novelty emerged when student samples evaluated the meaning of 24 emotion terms on 142 emotion features. This claim is debatable, however, because to date novelty has never been found in similarity sorting studies. It is possible that novelty emerged because sophisticated student samples evaluated emotion terms on emotion features. The current research identified a large, representative set of emotion terms using a free-listing task in a middle childhood up to early adulthood sample (N = 5071). Children, adolescents, students and adults (N = 1184) then evaluated the similarity between these emotion terms using a similarity rating task without priming any emotion feature. Novelty robustly emerged as the fourth dimension. The existence of novelty is thus confirmed with a different method across a wide variety of participants.     

TRANSCENDING OUR BIOLOGY: A VIRTUE ETHICS INTERPRETATION OF THE APPEAL TO NATURE IN TECHNOLOGICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS

“Arguments from nature” are used, and have historically been used, in popular responses to advances in technology and to environmental issues—there is a widely shared body of ethical intuitions that nature, or perhaps human nature, sets some limits on the kinds of ends that we should seek, the kinds of things that we should do, or the kinds of lives that we should lead. Virtue ethics can provide the context for a defensible form of the argument from nature, and one that makes proper sense of its enduring role in debates concerning our relationship to technology and the environment. However, the notion of an ethics founded upon an account of the essential features of human nature is controversial. On the one hand, contemporary biological science no longer defines species by their essential characteristics, so from a biological point of view there just are no essential characteristics of human beings. On the other hand, it might be argued that humans have, in some sense, “transcended our biology,” so an understanding of humans as a biological species is extraneous to ethical questions. In this article, I examine and defend the argument from nature, as a way to ground an ethic of virtue, from some of the more common criticisms that are made against it. I argue that, properly interpreted as an appeal to an evaluative account of human nature, the argument from nature is defensible with the context of virtue ethics and, in this light, I show how arguments from nature made in popular responses to technological and environmental issues are best understood.     

Brain correlates of subjective freedom of choice

The subjective feeling of free choice is an important feature of human experience. Experimental tasks have typically studied free choice by contrasting free and instructed selection of response alternatives. These tasks have been criticised, and it remains unclear how they relate to the subjective feeling of freely choosing. We replicated previous findings of the fMRI correlates of free choice, defined objectively. We introduced a novel task in which participants could experience and report a graded sense of free choice. BOLD responses for conditions subjectively experienced as free identified a postcentral area distinct from the areas typically considered to be involved in free action. Thus, the brain correlates of subjective feeling of free action were not directly related to any established brain correlates of objectively-defined free action. Our results call into question traditional assumptions about the relation between subjective experience of choosing and activity in the brain’s so-called voluntary motor areas.     

Increased response time of primed associates following an “episodic” hypnotic amnesia suggestion: A case of unconscious volition

Following a hypnotic amnesia suggestion, highly hypnotically suggestible subjects may experience amnesia for events. Is there a failure to retrieve the material concerned from autobiographical (episodic) memory, or is it retrieved but blocked from consciousness? Highly hypnotically suggestible subjects produced free-associates to a list of concrete nouns. They were then given an amnesia suggestion for that episode followed by another free association list, which included 15 critical words that had been previously presented. If episodic retrieval for the first trial had been blocked, the responses on the second trial should still have been at least as fast as for the first trial. With semantic priming, they should be faster. In fact, they were on average half a second slower. This suggests that the material had been retrieved but blocked from consciousness. A goal-oriented information processing framework is outlined to interpret these and related data.     

Focusing on Educational Outcomes

National education goals, content standards, and national tests are the hot topics of the day in educational reform. Special services personnel eventually will be faced with these issues, and can either be part of the discussion from the beginning, or wait and have to deal with someone else's decisions. In this article, we highlight some recent national and state educational reform activities and their probable implications for students with disabilities. We explain in brief the impetus behind the thrust toward an outcomesbased approach to education, and summarize the response of the National Center on Educational Outcomes for Students with Disabilities to this push. Possible ways in which special service providers can act to influence the focus on outcomes are described.     

Using Temporal Profiles and a Deviation from Balanced Approach to Understand Alcohol and Mental Health Problems

Abstract

The present study examined how multiple operationalizations of Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI) scores (raw scores; temporal profiles, based on cluster analysis; and the Deviation from a Balanced Time Perspective, or ‘transformed’ methodology) were related to both alcohol-related problems and symptoms of anxiety and depression. Participants were a large (N?=?816) university sample in the United Kingdom. A total of four time perspective profiles were observed: Futures, Presents, Past Negative-Futures, and Fatalists. Having a Present profile was associated with the worst alcohol-related outcomes. With regard to psychopathology, individuals with a Future profile reported the least anxious and depressive symptoms, and individuals with a Fatalistic profile reported the highest levels of depression. The effect of transformed scores was less robust, though greater deviation from a balanced perspective was associated with somewhat higher symptoms of anxiety and depression. Further, models using raw ZTPI dimension scores explained a greater amount of variance than models using the transformed scores. This study suggests that operationalizing the ZTPI in different ways produces results, which differ both in magnitude and statistical significance. We recommend that future studies using the ZTPI employ these various operationalizations in order that consensus on the optimal approach can be reached.